Students could face £10,000 annual tuition fee by 2020

A second wave of tuition fee increases has been signalled, which will result in students beginning their studies in autumn 2018 paying £9,500 a year.

As this increase is linked to inflation and supposedly high teaching quality, students could be paying up to £10,000 by 2020.

The government has already announced its intention to increase tuition fees from £9,000 a year to £9,250 from autumn 2017, but the Houses of Parliament are yet to finish debating the plans.

Some universities, such as Durham and Kent, have anticipated the increase in fees prior to the vote in Parliament, listing their courses as being £9,250 on their websites. The University of Exeter has controversially told its current students that their fees will increase to £9,250 from autumn 2017.

The University of Sheffield has not made such a bold move, but it said they will set fees for 2017-18 “within the government fee cap”.

When the government announced the first increase in fees, they said that the increases would be linked to teaching quality and would go to high performing universities.

However, they have already allowed an across-the-board increase to £9,250 for students starting their studies in 2017 and the signalled increase to £9,500 for the academic year of 2018-19, will apply to all gold, silver and bronze rated universities.

The process for deciding quality will be the “teaching excellence framework”, otherwise known as TEF, which The University of Sheffield’s Students’ Union has campaigned against with ‘Shef better than TEF’. Posters can be seen in the union and students can be seen campaigning against TEF, which has been nicknamed ‘the education factory’, across the university site.

We spoke to two students at the university, Madeleine Bishop, who studies economics and Animesh Anand, a second year materials science engineering student, to get their take on the government’s plan to increase tuition fees.